There was a snowstorm in the morning. It screened Chinese foxholes on hills above the perimeter and muffled artillery fire from the road to the pass, where the First Marine Division was fighting its way to the south.
It was December 8, 1950, on the frozen plateau of Koto-ri in the North Korean mountains. The troops were the First Marine Regiment, rear guard in one of the tragedies of American military history.
A funeral was in progress.
The thermometer by the commander’s tent stood at 25° below zero at dawn, when the first men tried to dig graves; their picks were useless in the iron-hard earth. Dynamite crews set off blasts, but the earth heaved up in enormous black blocks of ice. The commander halted them.
More than a hundred bodies waited in a row of tents, stiffly frozen, stacked like cordwood. “They’ll stay like that until the spring thaw,” the commander said, “but we can’t leave them to the wild dogs. Blast out those potato cellars.”
When the holes had been opened the officer called in a battalion of tanks for the burial, for there was no other way. The beams of the headlights were lost in the swirling snow and the roaring of the motors was carried away in the wind as the tanks made the graves. Back and forth, crunching icy blocks of earth upon the frozen bodies, the tanks buried the dead.
The commander was Colonel Lewis Burwell Puller, fifty-two years old, thirty-two years a U. S. Marine. He was in the process of winning his fifth Navy Cross—the nation’s second highest military award; no other Marine had won so many.
He was not a large man, but his slight, spare frame was erect to the limit of its five feet ten inches; the great thrust of his chest was obvious beneath the bulky uniform. The face was seamed and brown, as roughhewn as a totem pole. Beneath an ancient cap the almond-shaped eyes glinted green. The Colonel gripped a short pipe in his teeth as if he were on the point of gulping it down. His voice carried over the wind and down the rows of shuddering canvas like a Navy bullhorn. Among themselves, he was known to the men of the Corps only as Chesty Puller.
The Commandant of the Marine Corps had lately spoken of Colonel Puller: “He’s about the only man in the Corps who really loves to fight. I’ll go further: He’s the only man in any of our services who loves fighting.”
For two weeks Puller had commanded the rear of the First Marine Division, cut off in the Chosin Reservoir region by hundreds of thousands of Chinese Communist troops. The Colonel was visiting a hospital tent where a priest administered last rites to Marine wounded when a messenger came:
“Sir, do you know they’ve cut us off? We’re entirely surrounded.”
“Those poor bastards,” Puller said. “They’ve got us right where we want ’em. We can shoot in every direction now.”
There had been last-minute reinforcements, a battalion of U. S. Army troops which fought its way through the enemy with heavy losses. Its colonel reported to Puller for orders.
“Take your position along those hills and have your men dig in.”
“Yes, sir. Now, where is my line of retreat?”
Puller’s voice became slow and hard: “I’m glad you asked me that. Now I know where you stand. Wait one minute.” He took a field telephone and called his tank commander. The Army officer listened to the Marine order:
“I’ve got a new outfit,” Puller said. He gave its position in detail. “If they start to pull back from that line, even one foot, I want you to open fire on them.” He hung up the telephone and turned to the Army officer:
“Does that answer your question?”
The last plane flew out in the afternoon through a momentary gap in the clouds; it carried nineteen wounded through the falling snow, the last of twenty-five hundred who had been flown to safety. The rear guard prepared to join the withdrawal.
Puller countermanded part of his orders from his superiors. “Abandon vehicles, they say, and destroy supplies! To hell with all that. Don’t leave a thing that will roll or we can carry. Take every scrap you can. We’ll take out more trucks than we brought, thanks to the Army. Can you imagine—going off and leaving ’em with the keys still in the locks?”
The Colonel sought his jeep driver, Sergeant Orville Jones. “Load up with the rest of the dead and wounded. But look ’em over close. Make sure they’re Marines before you take ’em.”
Jones began his work. He lashed the body of a young tank commander to the front bumper; other bodies went across the top. Wounded men crawled inside until the small vehicle could hold no more. The sergeant nosed his way into the stream of traffic on the slippery road to the pass.
Puller left on foot at 3 P.M., when only the reconnaissance company remained behind to face a last barrage of Chinese mortar shells. The Colonel walked to the pass. Three hours later when Sergeant Jones removed the commander’s boots he found that the feet were beginning to freeze. The felt pads of the boots ripped with the sound of tearing cloth. Jones put Puller into the heated jeep, but within a few minutes the Colonel was walking again, rotating with other officers and men. He walked most of the way down the long miles to safety.
He stopped often to herd men together by squads, platoons and companies: “You’re the First Marine Division—and don’t you forget it. We’re the greatest military outfit that ever walked on this earth. Not all the Communists in hell can stop you. We’ll go down to the sea at our own pace and nothing is going to get in our way. If it does, we’ll blow hell out of it.”
When he found men of his own regiment he growled more deeply: “You’re the finest regiment in the finest division in history. We’re not retreating! We’ve about-faced to get at more of those bastards. Be proud you’re First Marines.”
The column made slow progress down the road, which snaked its way along the flanks of hills. It halted for stalled vehicles or Communist attacks, but until daylight faded, planes flew cover overhead, and when the enemy was visible they bombed and strafed the hillsides. At Funichilin Pass, the crest of the road, engineers had dropped into place a steel bridge frame, its 2500-pound sections delivered by parachute. The tanks barely scraped across, and the column moved on. When the rear guard had passed, the bridge was blown.
Marines estimated that at least a hundred thousand of the miserable Korean civilians crowded the road in the rear, huddled, pressing as near as they dared, held back only by warning shots. Puller’s final instructions to the commander of the last unit had been almost savage:
“Don’t let those civilians press in on you. The crowd is full of Chinese troops. Whatever happens, shoot to kill if they come close. Don’t be misled by their innocent look—those devils will push women and children ahead of them, and if they get among the tanks we may lose the whole end of the column.”
Puller was not content until the young lieutenant repeated the order to him: “Keep the road clear if we have to kill ’em all.”
The Colonel’s last glimpse of the rear was the pathetic refugee pack, half-frozen in its rags, dark unblinking eyes turned upon the last of the retreating Marines on the icy downhill road.
As he plodded around a bend the Colonel heard singing. Artillery fire interrupted and snow still pelted, but he made out the chanting of the Marine Hymn. There were popular songs, too, some of them as old as World War II. Puller passed the chorus, some Headquarters Company boys from the Northeastern states. One of them was Corporal Robert Pratt of Springfield, Massachusetts:
“All of us were singing at the tops of our voices. We had no idea the Old Man was anywhere around, until he bobbed up in the rear, the way he usually did. We were singing ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’ when he passed us—none of us knew he was from Virginia. He grinned and waved at us and we howled a little louder, over the wind and the guns. The snow was beginning to peter out. He looked pleased with us, as if he thought we’d make it down the mountains okay.”
A mile or so down the slope Puller got grim news: The tanks at the rear had been attacked. Chinese soldiers, pushing civilians ahead of them, had come from the crowd with hidden weapons, offering to surrender. The brave young lieutenant, wary but nervous, had gone to meet them. There had been fighting in the road, and a few grenades under tank treads had done the rest. There were casualties, but now the column inched on without half a dozen of its tanks.
The Colonel shouted to the next file: “All right, Marines! Remember who you are. Nobody ever fought with a better outfit. We’re going to get on the beach, and get on some warm ships and eat hot food and get showers. Then we’ll fight somewhere again. You’re the First Marine Division!”
He walked the last miles to the trucks which waited far below. When he came to the port of Hungnam, under the guns of a waiting American fleet, the high command knew that the rear of the Division was safe.
Lewis Puller was one of the rarest of Marines, a onetime private who rose to become a lieutenant general. From a boyhood haunted by tales of his Confederate ancestors, his life had been one long preparation for war. He had lived through more than a hundred combats in the banana wars of Haiti and Nicaragua to win a grim nickname: El Tigre. He had been accused of paying bounty for the ears of native bandits.
He had commanded Horse Marines in Peking in the early ’thirties, and in Shanghai, on the eve of World War II, he had driven a superior force of Japanese troops from the American quarter at gun-point. He had been trained for battle as an infantryman, cavalryman, artilleryman, aviator and shipboard officer. He had led the first championship Marine drill team and had been famous as student and instructor in military schools.
In the first Allied offensive of World War II, at Guadalcanal, he had with one half-strength battalion saved Henderson Field by standing off a Japanese division. On that island his men had won two Medals of Honor, twenty-eight Navy Crosses and Silver Stars—and two hundred sixty-four Purple Hearts. He had been chosen by General George C. Marshall to tour American Army camps, to shatter the myth of Japanese invincibility and to bolster shaky morale in the United States.
At Cape Gloucester on New Britain he had taken over two confused and stalled battalions under fire and led them to swift victory. And at Peleliu he had suffered record casualties in defeating the Japanese in one of the most terrible of Marine battles.
Six years later he had been called from peacetime obscurity to lead ashore the assault at Inchon, where the tide began to turn in Korea.
At home in the village of Saluda, Virginia, Puller had a tangled mass of decorations in a cigar box, more than any other man in Corps history had won for valor in combat. Four of them were Navy Crosses. In the end there were to be over fifty in all, medals, ribbons, stars and palms covering the years since Parris Island during World War I.
His name was legend wherever Marines met in barracks and barrooms to swap tales, for no Marine had approached his twenty-seven years of foreign service or long exposure in combat, and no officer had become such a hero to men in the ranks. When Marines had talked of Lou Diamond or Gimlet Eye Butler or Bigfoot Brown or Pappy Boyington, there were always dozens of stories to be told about Chesty Puller. Incredibly, most of the tales were true.
In the recruit depot at San Diego, California, there were Marine drill sergeants who taught their men traditions of the Corps by assembling them for a final song before Taps. They sang to the tune of “Good Night, Ladies”:
Good night, Chesty! Good night, Chesty!
Good night, Chesty—wherever you may be!
After you the Corps will roll, Corps will roll, Corps will roooooll,
After you the Corps will roll—on to victoreee!